TIOBE Index for February 2015

February Headline: JavaScript at highest position ever

After having won the TIOBE programming language award of 2014 last month, JavaScript keeps going strong. This month it surpasses PHP and is now at position 6. This is JavaScript's highest position ever. On the other hand, Objective-C's days seem to be over. Objective-C lost more than 5% in one year's time and is now back at fourth position behind C++. Objective-C was in third place in the TIOBE index for more than 2.5 years.

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming
languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of
skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as
Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings.
It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language
in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a
strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new
software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

Feb 2015

Feb 2014

Change

Programming Language

Ratings

Change

1

1

C

16.488%

-1.85%

2

2

Java

15.345%

-1.97%

3

4

C++

6.612%

-0.28%

4

3

Objective-C

6.024%

-5.32%

5

5

C#

5.738%

-0.71%

6

9

JavaScript

3.514%

+1.58%

7

6

PHP

3.170%

-1.05%

8

8

Python

2.882%

+0.72%

9

10

Visual Basic .NET

2.026%

+0.23%

10

-

Visual Basic

1.718%

+1.72%

11

20

Delphi/Object Pascal

1.574%

+1.05%

12

13

Perl

1.390%

+0.50%

13

15

PL/SQL

1.263%

+0.66%

14

16

F#

1.179%

+0.59%

15

11

Transact-SQL

1.124%

-0.54%

16

30

ABAP

1.048%

+0.69%

17

14

MATLAB

1.033%

+0.39%

18

44

R

0.963%

+0.71%

19

17

Pascal

0.960%

+0.41%

20

12

Ruby

0.873%

-0.05%

Other programming languages

The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. This overview is
published unofficially, because it could be the case that we missed a language. If
you have the impression there is a programming language lacking, please notify us
at tpci@tiobe.com.

Position

Programming Language

Ratings

21

ML

0.861%

22

COBOL

0.858%

23

SAS

0.832%

24

PostScript

0.801%

25

Logo

0.796%

26

Assembly

0.751%

27

Swift

0.723%

28

OpenEdge ABL

0.704%

29

ActionScript

0.692%

30

D

0.619%

31

Fortran

0.543%

32

Lisp

0.519%

33

Groovy

0.502%

34

RPG (OS/400)

0.469%

35

Ada

0.445%

36

Awk

0.433%

37

Scratch

0.411%

38

Scheme

0.391%

39

Max/MSP

0.363%

40

Lua

0.353%

41

Scala

0.318%

42

Prolog

0.317%

43

Go

0.302%

44

Inform

0.300%

45

PL/I

0.293%

46

Haskell

0.266%

47

LabVIEW

0.250%

48

(Visual) FoxPro

0.250%

49

C shell

0.249%

50

VBScript

0.233%

The Next 50 Programming Languages

The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are
relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical
order).

Some search engines allow to query pages that have been added last year. The TIOBE index should only track those recently added pages.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Am I allowed to show the TIOBE index in my weblog/presentation/publication?

A: Yes, the only condition is to refer to its original source "www.tiobe.com".

Q: How may I nominate a new language to be added to the TIOBE index?

A: If a language meets the criteria of being listed (i.e. it is Turing complete and has an own Wikipedia entry that indicates that it concerns a programming language) and it is sufficiently popular (more than 25,000 hits for +"<language> programming" for Google), then please write an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.

Q: I would like to have the complete data set of the TIOBE index. Is this possible?

A: We spent a lot of effort to obtain all the data and keep the TIOBE index up to date.
In order to compensate a bit for this, we ask a fee of 5,000 US$ for the complete data set.
The data set runs from June 2001 till today. It started with 25 languages back in 2001, and
now measures more than 150 languages once a month. The data are availabe in comma separated
format. Please contact sales@tiobe.com for more information.

Q: Why is the maximum taken to calculate the ranking for a grouping, why not the sum?

A: Well, you can do it either way and both are wrong. If you take the sum, then you get the intersection
twice. If you take the max, then you miss the difference. Which one to choose? Suppose somebody comes up with a new search term that is 10% of
the original. If you take the max, nothing changes. If you take the sum then the ratings will rise 10%. So
taking the sum will be an incentive for some to come up with all kinds of obscure terms for a language. That's
why we decided to take the max.

The proper way to solve this is is of course to take the sum and subtract the intersection. This will give
rise to an explosion of extra queries that must be performed. Suppose a language has a grouping of 15 terms,
then you have to perform 32,768 queries (all combinations of intersections).
So this seems not possible either... If somebody has a solution for this, please let us know.

Q: What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?

A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its methodology.
They performed a general sweep action to get rid of all kinds of web sites that had been
pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop for languages such as Java and C++. In
order to minimize such fluctuations in the future, we added two more search engines (MSN
and Yahoo) a few months after this incident.

Q: Why is YouTube used as a search engine for the TIOBE index?

A: First of all, YouTube counts for less than 10% of all ratings, so it has hardly any
influence on the index. YouTube has been added as an experiment. It qualified for the TIOBE
index because of its high ranking on Alexa. YouTube is a young platform (so an indicator
for popularity) and there are quite some lectures, presentations, programming tips and
language introductions available on YouTube.